Expose: Goldstone Kept Anti-Apartheid Teen in Jail in 1986

Ex-South African Judge Goldstone censured Israel for war crimes while fighting terror. An expose reveals he once jailed an anti-Apartheid teen.

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Tzvi Ben Gedalyahu, 23/11/09 15:40 | updated: 15:51

Judge Richard Goldstone

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Former South African Judge Richard Goldstone, who censured Israel for alleged war crimes while fighting Hamas terrorists, once kept a 13-year-old in jail for protesting against his country’s Apartheid policy, according to investigative journalist Ashley Rindsberg.

South African writer and historian R.W. Johnson wrote in an October, 2009 that the indictment "was so inappropriate that the judges in The Hague passed a motion severely censuring Goldstone,” according to Rindsberg.

The journalist also revealed, “Goldstone ruled against the 1986 appeal of a 13-year-old boy who had been sentenced to jail for disrupting school as a protest against Apartheid and increasingly draconian "emergency laws" used to preserve order and squelch opposition to the government.

“In a similar case that year, Judge Goldstone ruled against two appellants who had been convicted for possession of a cassette tape that had a recording of an interview” with a founding member of the African National Congress, the country’s liberation movement.

Goldstone ruled against the defendant because he violated the South African “security act” by stating such “subversive” phrases as "let us change our own country into the kind of society we want it to be."

“Goldstone's comment that the two young men had acted as agents of the ANC was later cited by the higher appellate court as reason to once again uphold the convictions,” Rindsberg wrote.